Department of Art History
Art History 2026 Graduation Luncheon Program
The Honors Program in Art History at Rutgers University provides outstanding students with the opportunity to pursue independent, sustained research culminating in a senior thesis. Over the course of the academic year, students work closely with faculty advisors to develop and refine original scholarship. The Honors Symposium celebrates the fruit of this hard work, bringing together students, faculty, and guests for a public presentation of their undergraduate research.
For more on the event go to Art History Honors Symposium 2026
In conjunction with the Zimmerli Art Museum's exhibition, Allan Rohan Crite: Neighborhood, please join us for a discussion between Amber N. Wiley (Prof, U of Oklahoma and author of the forthcoming Collective Yearning: Black Women Artists from the Zimmerli Art Museum) and Diana Greenwald (William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum).
Celebrate the launch of new books on feminist biographies, including Alice Barber: An Artist’s Triumph on Tragedy, with a lecture by esteemed Rutgers alumna, Gail Levin (Distinguished Professor of Art History, American Studies, and Women's Studies at the Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York). A book signing and reception follow the talk.
The last ten years have seen a burgeoning interest in the photography of the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic. In these decades, the Sultan embraced the medium as a means to disseminate images of his quickly modernizing realm and to catalogue its dissidents, while popular periodicals printed copious amounts of photographic reportage, much as was being done in Western Europe. The first decade of the Republic then saw a further explosion of this popular visual culture in the press, while portrait studios flourished more than ever. Investigations into this copious amount of material have revealed a thriving and multidimensional photographic culture that had yet to be critically digested. Our symposium takes stock of this new scholarship and explores new directions. It features presentations by senior academics and emerging scholars, and responses from specialists in the field. To borrow a term from the recent book, we will ask what defined the Camera Ottomana and whether this very nomenclature is too totalizing.
The event is free and open to the public.
Sponsors
Center for Cultural AnalysisIslam, the Humanities and the HumanArt History Department (Rutgers, New Brunswick)Arts, Culture and Media Department (Rutgers, Newark)Department of Anthropology (Rutgers, New Brunswick)The Rutgers Art History Graduate Student Organization (AHSO)The Rutgers Graduate Student Association (GSA)
The Library of Istanbul University holds an impressive collection of photographs, which is proudly presented as the “Photographic Albums of Sultan Abdülhamid Khan II.” While with almost 1,000 albums containing over 36,000 photographs, this collection is truly a goldmine of visual information on the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the 20th century, it has not yet been subjected to any systematic study of its nature, contents, and historical context.
Book launch for Print Matters and there will be presentations and a roundtable, as well as a reception.
In 2019, the artist Christine Howard Sandoval (Chalon Indian Nation) began making large-scale drawings and sculptures from adobe mud. These works study how California Native arts, such as basketry and earthworks, inflect mission architectures.
This lecture focuses on ancient and especially early medieval writings obsessed with the idea of being the first and especially on the emergence of the medieval Arabic genre of writing in the early days of Islam called al-awa‘il (the plural of al-awwal, namely the first).
Subashini Kaligotla, Barbara Stoler Miller Associate Professor of Indian and South Asian Art at Columbia University, will be presenting a paper entitled: "Off With Their Heads: Medieval Andhra Women, Memorial Stones, and the Aesthetics of Self-Sacrifice."
